Blood Stained Glass

Blood Stained Glass is an eclectic music project by multi-instrumentalist Ben Bernard, who plays all instruments and sings. Blood Stained Glass's music explores genres ranging across surf guitar, progressive rock, electronica, death metal, classical piano, folk, and more. Not content to be tied to any one sound, Blood Stained Glass looks to perform intelligent music in whatever style seems appropriate for it.Blood Stained Glass spent much of its history under the name Midgard. But by 2007,...

Blood Stained Glass is an eclectic music project by multi-instrumentalist Ben Bernard, who plays all instruments and sings. Blood Stained Glass's music explores genres ranging across surf guitar, progressive rock, electronica, death metal, classical piano, folk, and more. Not content to be tied to any one sound, Blood Stained Glass looks to perform intelligent music in whatever style seems appropriate for it.Blood Stained Glass spent much of its history under the name Midgard. But by 2007, dozens of bands were going by the name Midgard. Rather than get lost in the crowd, Midgard was changed to Blood Stained Glass.Blood Stained Glass's debut album was a mostly instrumental shred guitar album called "One Man Jam", recorded at home on a 433 MHz personal computer. Allmusic.com called Midgard "a lo-fi equivalent to Joe Satriani." Several of the tracks ranked high on mp3.com's genre charts, with "Homeworld Bound" reaching #12 in instrumental metal, and "Repetitive Motion Syndrome" reaching #4 in industrial metal.One Man Jam was followed up in 2002 with a much heavier and darker metal album entitled "Darkness Descending", which culminated in its four-movement, 22-minute long death metal closing suite, which debuted in the top 20 of mp3.com's death metal charts.Infinity's Cradle followed Darkness Descending in 2003. A stark contrast from its predecessor, half of Infinity's Cradle was light, mostly acoustic folk, and half ambient electronica.The electronic element was explored to its fullest on the late 2003 EP Symbiotech, which was featured on 97.7 WOXY's Local Lixx radio show.This was followed in 2004 by an EP of classical piano pieces. This EP was very well recieved on soundclick.com, with one song reaching #1 in chamber music and staying there for a week before slowly declining from its peak.The full-length album Winter came in 2005. It was a six-song progressive death metal album, with the 15-minute progressive rock song "Reverie" providing a subdued finish.2006 Saw the avantgarde noise collage album "Requies Addo Nihil". Translated from Latin, it roughly means "Repose Brings Nothing". With only one traditional song out of 40 minutes, it intentionally tests the listener's patients to the limits, while exploring sonic pallettes that can be found through extreme manipulation of waveforms of normal instruments. The context of the album describes the feelings and environment of a person who falls into a Kerr-Neumann black hole but does not touch the singularity until the very end.A sequel to 2003's Symbiotech EP was found in the collection Space Music, in 2007. Collecting various ambient tracks with some new tracks, the collection is very spacey indeed. The album features the songs "Hypnotherapy" and "Deviant Art", and employs a large amount of subsonic frequencies, as well as a radio telescope sample of pulsar HD190785.2008 saw the release of "Bleugarten", an eight-minute progressive death metal opus picking apart sensationalism in news media among other topics. Bleugarten is the first song released that is slated to be on the as-yet unrecorded "Exercises in Brutality" album, which has been placed on hiatus until proper recording equipment and time can be obtained.